Healthcare Innovation: SAP HANA Provides Data-Driven Healing Touch

In China alone, diabetes rages out of control, affecting 15 million people. In countries around the world, patients are diagnosed with stage two cancer four months after receiving negative cancer screening tests.

Predicting who will become ill and charting the optimal care plan is the next generation of health according to SAP HANA startup partner, Convergence CT. Speaking at SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, Florida, CEO Lambert Onuma outlined his company’s simple vision for healthier lives powered by data insights, courtesy of the SAP HANA platform. The objective is to unite fragmented data silos that characterize many hospital environments everywhere.

“From misdiagnosed images to predicting what will become cancerous and managing chronic health problems, our vision for healthcare is about convergence, a federate approach to business intelligence that lets physicians, researchers and hospitals query and compare a wide spectrum of patient data samples,” said Onuma. “We’ve standardized systems on the SAP HANA Platform, aggregating patient data that can be added on-the-fly for predictive and personalized medicine. If we’re able to predict outcomes, we can make a difference.”

Rapidly expanding to Asia and Europe, the U.S.-based company is driven by a passion for excellence that’s also grounded in a personal commitment. Onuma told the rapt audience about his response when a close friend recently became ill and suddenly passed away.

“My good friend had hypertension, was on medication and visited the doctor regularly. One day, she unexpectedly passed away, and we found out it was a torn aorta, despite having normal blood pressure,” he said. “We have to get to a point where we can predict risk levels, and use the data to prescribe the best course of action from treatment through follow-up. This is what SAP HANA can do for us.”

Onuma introduced Dr. Tom Summerfelt, Vice President of Research and Innovation at Illinois-based Advocate Health Care the largest accountable care organization in the United States. Advocate Health Care is partnering with SAP and Convergence CT to help deliver the best patient outcomes at the lowest cost.

The new era in healthcare depends on data analytics to drive value-based care. However, Summerfelt finds healthcare lags behind other industries when it comes to technology. He calls for worldwide collaboration around testing, treatment and the sharing of best practices over time

“We call it healthlytics – data analytics that ultimately promotes health in patients, provider organizations and life science entities,” he said. “Working on the SAP HANA Platform, we’re able to do that now. We can look at predictive analytics and ask questions, identifying drivers and risks that we never knew before.”

Summerfelt is particularly excited about the ability to trace patients long-term.

“When a major pharmaceutical company came to us with questions about a drug, we were able to use SAP HANA to trace people over six years – not just if they got the drug, but who prescribed it, what happened afterward, and what led up to them getting it, and not just in that one treatment but in other kinds of treatment. This is very powerful because it allows us to craft the best course of treatment when people come in,” he said.